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Rock 'n' Roll with Chinese Characteristics: Nirvana Behind the Great Wall

Like pretty much everywhere else in the pop music universe, China's developing rock scene changed after Nirvana. It's just that China's rockers didn't get the memo in 1991, nor would've known what to do with it, then.

                                      
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Like pretty much everywhere else in the pop music universe, China's developing rock scene changed after Nirvana. It's just that China's rockers didn't get the memo in 1991, nor would've known what to do with it, then.

On Shanghai dance halls of the late '30s and a vinyl tango artifact that survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai and Flowers of Shanghai capture a William S. Borroughs-like Interzone in Old Shanghai.

Pema Tseden's Tharlo presents an allegory of Tibet and China in the guise of a film noir story set in Thailand

Award-winning fiction writer Jack Livings discusses his new book, The Dog, and the importance of writing with moral purpose.

According to What?, a retrospective of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Left Foot is a varied album but not a restless one.

From the peak of the Qing Dynasty to today, China has moved far and fast. Here's a chance to catch up.

World War II changed the way we eat, live and work on such a fundamental scale that to those in the West it seems like there has never been anything other than the globalized world it created.

Like the scene in romantic movies where two lovers see each other from across a crowded room and begin running towards one another, culturally the US seems to be rushing towards China as fast as China is rushing towards the US.

Peking, on the edge of World War II, couldn't have been more fraught with tension. The brutal murder of a young Englishwoman was the proverbial match struck to this powder keg of a city.

The diplomat believes he’s a skillful player, he believes he’s in control; but the game is much bigger than he is, and defines what he can and cannot do.

The various threads of Eric Enno Tamm's journey converge and he offers as lucid an insight into China’s malaise as any foreigner could be expected to provide.

Governments tend to take on their worst form, to devolve to their most horrific manifestation, when they kill artists. Artists look out into the horrors of the world, and inevitably, the horrors sometimes reach back.

Grizzly Rose's lies may be fantastic, but Gemini's songwriting is terrific as well.

Facets two-DVD package, Chinese Cinema Through a Communist Len, provides potent, if minimal, representations of an era of Chinese filmmaking rarely seen in the US.

A spotlight on the Chinese electronic music scene, just in time for the World Expo.

The last Chemehuevi-speaking Indian drives a tractor for a living and is wearing a Caterpillar tractor hat and dark sunglasses, speaking the last utterances of a language that predates writing.

P.K. 14 + Xiao He: 14 November 2009 - Govinda Gallery, Washington DC / Chinese punks storm the American Capitol / Words and Pictures by Mehan Jayasuriya

Toussaint dives deep into how we stretch ourselves thin between places in our attempt to be with one another.

This book should be essential reading to students in Iran and across the world who need a manual on student activism.

Mamer demystifies the experience of Chinese Central Asian music and keeps the beauty of the sound.

At once intimate and devastating, China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province insists on tight framing of grieving faces.

Alive is exploratory yet ultimately gentle. It's more daring than most of China's mainstream croon-pop, but similarly unwilling to strike out at its audience.

Written like a college textbook and packaged like a novel, this book blurs the line between storytelling and statistical analysis, making for an interesting, complex read.

In effect, Pigface has changed continents and absorbed a few dozen new members.

Like a sweet little ant that you don't want to step on.

Lisa See's Peony in Love about a lovelorn maiden disappoints as a novel but is a fascinating window on historical China.

Scholar says the cycle of neglect that marks U.S. policy toward Central America isn't likely to be broken soon.

Peony brings to life the heartache of women in 17th century China.

Gammage's beautifully written memoir, which weaves together emotionally wrenching narrative with insightful social commentary, will resonate with any American who has taken the same journey.

Dear Bono, Bjork and the Beasties: Free Tibet is great. But Tibet is only a fraction of the population of people who are also deserving of your celebrity activism.